Furnaces and unpopular opinions

[resonant]

Today the furnace guy came to do a fall inspection for us. He was a big guy with curly gray hair and one of those mustaches that goes straight down on either side of the mouth, as though it's looking to join up with a beard that isn't there. The connection between his jeans and his hips was precarious.

When he was done with the furnace, he came upstairs to the dining room to write me a receipt. "Oh," he said, looking on top of the piano where all the other musical instruments are. "Who plays the dulcimer?"

"Well, it's mine," I said, "but I haven't learned to play it."

"It's easy," he said, lifting it off the piano. (I was thankful that I had at least dusted it.) "Got a pick?"

I didn't, so he got a dollar bill out of his pocket and folded it up. Then he tuned the dulcimer and played "Turkey In the Straw" and a really fast version of "Amazing Grace" while the kidlet danced around the table.

You just never know, do you?

-----

I can't resist offering ten unpopular fannish opinions. (musesfool appears to have launched this one; I first saw it by way of penknife.)



1. Mpreg, in and of itself, won't keep me away from a story. I have read and enjoyed mpreg stories. In my experience, the odds are better with mpreg than they are with, say, rape recovery. (At least in sci-fi and magical universes. I admit that a Due South mpreg would be a tough sell.)

2. I don't want to read about anyone inflicting physical pain, either consensually or not. The more detail there is, the less I want to read it.

3. My time here on earth is limited, and if a writer has a pseudonym that's excessively fangirlish (Mrs. Severina Marvolo), pinkygirlish (Lady Rainbow Fyre), wicca-Gothish (Lady Raven Darkness), or sophomoric (Mighty_Penis_Bitch), I'm probably going to give her work a miss.

4. Much as I love the whole concept of Trekishness, I don't read K/S slash. I don't like to think about Leonard Nimoy's and William Shatner's bodies having sex.

5. Real people aren't as interesting as fictional characters. And I'm afraid that singers and actors are even less interesting than other real people.

6. Most drabbles are completely pointless.

7. If the people and/or the relationships aren't different after the sex than they were before it, why should I be bothered reading about the sex?

8. Gen bores me.

9. Sibling incest bores and baffles me. I have a brother. I love my brother. I would have sex with my brother only if the last two humans on the planet were him and Donald Rumsfeld.

10. I really don't like television very much.

Comments

[everythingisaid.livejournal.com]

Unpopular? I agree with all of those.

[ardent-muses.livejournal.com]

It kind of startles me that number 2 would be an unpopular opinion. Holy cow.

Number 7 is the best thing I've read all week. Month, maybe.

[justacat.livejournal.com]

Spend some time in the HP fandom, Ardent. Or go check out Telanu's (somniesperus's) LJ thread about fics people find arousing, here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/somniesperus/186816.html) (and try to identify my post, hee!). I was just stunned by the number of people who responded (all anonymously) who find pain - explicit, bloody, disgusting pain - and noncon arousing. Person after person listed these sadistic, icky fics. I started to feel like some kind of goody goody prissy rube - I mean, I just like good old fashioned explicit smut between consenting men - how booooring, dahling.

And hear hear for numbers six and eight! Drabbles are like the emperor with no clothes ... (oh, what a lovely robe you have on, Emperor!) and I mean, gen? Why?

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Pain isn't necessarily disgusting...

You might find some interesting essays here (http://www.trickster.org/symposium/coltopic.html#ghc) on the character-torture and rapefic kinks. And not to get narky, but there's no need to get so judgmental about other people's kinks.

[thereallyle.livejournal.com]

Yes. If you don't like it, don't read it! And don't go telling me I'm a sicko because I do like it.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Did I say it was disgusting? Did I say you were a sicko? What I said was, I don't want to read it.

[justacat.livejournal.com]

Actually the point of this meme thingy is to express unpopular opinions. Like Resonant, my apparently unpopular opinion is that I don't want to read about pain. The fact that you disagree confirms that this opinion is indeed unpopular in certain circles - and indeed, my view was clearly the minority over on Telanu's thread.

But as tzikeh says so eloquently in her "ten opinions" list, here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/tzikeh/83483.html) (see#6), If you dislike something someone writes or reads or thinks, you don't necessarily dislike that person. And if you can't hold a concept like that in your head, you have more problems than I can help with.

I didn't - and don't - judge you or anyone else for your kinks. You can read and love and get turned on by whatever you want - doesn't bother me, even if I don't understand it. I have many fannish friends with kinks I don't share or understand. But in my opinion, which is what this is all about, after all, character torture and noncon of the type to which I referred in my first comment are disgusting and entirely unarousing, and I don't want to read about it.

[eliade.livejournal.com]

Huh. It's funny how I can read your list and love you all the more (girl smooch!) and read someone else's list and want to spork them to death slowly for being a vicious c---. I am always vaguely tempted by this meme (I've seen it before), but I feel like I mouth off about my opinions all the time and, like, do I have anything left to say? Heh.

Somehow I don't think my ikea icon represents the tone of my comment, but hey. *g*

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Well, this is clearly because I'm superior to all others. Or else because I'm such a wimp that I don't actually write anything genuinely unpopular, so it's all a nice safe little peeve petting zoo, one.

[bluster.livejournal.com]

I agree with everyone else that most of these don't seem unpopular to me. At least, not in my corner of the universe. And dude...definitely agree on the K/S. {{shudder}}

[rliz.livejournal.com]

> The connection between his jeans and his hips was precarious.

I love this sentence.

[shadowluck.livejournal.com]

Gen loves me, but I'll go for 1-7 and 9-10. :)

[laurelwood.livejournal.com]

I long for a dulcimer. I'd love to hear what inspired you to buy yours!

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

My dad gave it to me, actually, for reasons unknown. (He's an antiques dealer, and I expect he picked it up at an auction.) It's a beauty -- the furnace guy says it's handmade, and not from a kit, either.

I'm kind of ashamed of not having learned to play it yet.

[axiom_of_stripe]

I would have sex with my brother only if the last two humans on the planet were him and Donald Rumsfeld.

if the last two humans on the planet were your brother and donald rumsfeld, why would you be jetting in on your ufo looking for a one-night-stand?

*grin*

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Oh, technical. You must be related to me.

Actually it occurred to me after I wrote that that even if we three were the last people on the planet, my main reason for boffing my brother wouldn't be so much to satisfy my own carnal desires as to make sure he wasn't tempted to satisfy his with Rumsfeld. [shudder]

Number 3!

[thermidor.livejournal.com]

That cracks me up. I never thought about it too much but yeah, if someone writes under the name Frannie Fraser or Hermione Magick that's a deal breaker for their fic.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I make exceptions for a few people, but only on recs from people I trust. It narrows the field nicely, especially in HP.

Hilarious

[vulgarweed.livejournal.com]

How great is this?

For the record I'm not with ya on #s 2, 6, and 8 necessarily. I'm utterly neutral on #10 (I lack siblings), and for the rest I say preach it.

Re: Hilarious

[vulgarweed.livejournal.com]

nine, dammit. I'm neutral on 9!!

I am ultra-super with ya on #10

[anoddplace.livejournal.com]

I am so very with you on three. I actually tried for a while to work out a system for avoiding badfic based on the writer's penname. May have to try again. :)

Also, I am with you on the blood/pain/hurt thing. Does nothing for me, except make we wonder vaguely if they know some secret for getting blood off sheets that I don't. (If they do, why don't they share?)

[aretina.livejournal.com]

I seem to have taken "you never know" to new levels, now expecting the unexpected from even the most ordinary looking (or poor or old or apparantly dimwitted) people. It beats expecting the worst, most times. I'm not sure when this happened-- guess I just had a lot of experiences like yours. Also, there's a lot of refugees who live near my house. You never know when the person walking to work at the factory might be a published poet and translator in their native languages, or a doctor or other professional. The only time I'm ever disappointed (as opposed to merely still wondering) is when people turn out to be truly cruel.

#3 scares me, as I can never seem to come up with a name that isn't one of those dreaded things.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Well, Aretina is a perfectly lovely name, and doesn't sound like you stole it from either Anne Rice or Mattel, so I'd say you're fine.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

7. If the people and/or the relationships aren't different after the sex than they were before it, why should I be bothered reading about the sex?
Eee. *loves you* Thank you for helping me understand one of the reasons I like First Time so much.

[tradescant.livejournal.com]

Well, you know, it doesn't even have to be first time, I think; I mean, any sex can be revelatory or transformative if you write it properly. I like reading down-and-dirty PWPs, but I reserve a special affection for the ones that are (and I think it was you, Res, who first put it this way for me) smut-and-more. When there's a story to be told inside the smut.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

It's possible to screw up a first-time story, too, but it seems to take more effort -- because they change the relationship, they seem to come with a certain built-in significance.

I have a lot of respect for people who write significant established-relationship stories, and I try to challenge myself to do it regularly, too.

I don't have anything against a story that has no purpose but to be sexy. It's just that it won't be sexy to me unless there's something at stake.

[spiralled.livejournal.com]

5. Real people aren't as interesting as fictional characters. And I'm afraid that singers and actors are even less interesting than other real people.

THANK YOU.

(I do love gen though if it's done well.)

[raggedrose.livejournal.com]

Oh bless you!
I thought I was probably the only person in the world who hated drabbles. Very few are complete in and of themselves, and it seems to me to be generally a lazy form. You want feedback, but you can't be bothered to do the work of writing a whole story. And 5??? I bow down at your feet! I fall in love with the characters. That doesn't mean I know a thing about the actors, or really want to.

I've read well written gen, though.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I have actually seen posts on hp100 where the writer has, say, five drabbles, and each one picks up where the other one left off. That's not five stories, pal; that's one story divided into five arbitrary chunks. When you write a story, it really matters where it begins and where it ends.

[tradescant.livejournal.com]

Most drabbles are completely pointless.

*huddles protectively over dozens of pointless drabbles*

TWO THUMBS DOWN, YOU AND YOUR POPULAR UNPOPULAR OPINIONS.

Whoops, did I say that out loud?

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I did say most! Your drabbles are exemplary -- whole stories in miniature.

I totally understand why so few people do them well; they're hard. What I don't understand is why so many people do them at all.

It's like -- you can't take a paragraph from the newspaper, break it up into fourteen arbitrary ten-syllable lines, and then say, "Look! It's a sonnet!"

[tradescant.livejournal.com]

Man, I really kind of want to try the newspaper sonnet now. To maybe go along with my mail-order catalog free-verse poetry. I have a friend whom I call periodically (actually, it's my friend who lives in the same city you do) and I read catalog copy aloud to her answering machine in that horrible poetry-reading monotone
with long pauses
at the end of
each
line
for emphasis.

*is twelve*

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Bwah!

When the spouse used to be Catholic, his church had all these books of "contemporary prayers for young people" (picture a paperback book printed to look like denim -- that kind of shit), and they were all like that -- dead-brained prose, broken up into random lines:

Well, Lord,
I suppose the church
is never going to change its mind
about homosexuality,
so help me out ...

Semi-relevantly, somewhere recently I read that many newspaper headlines can be sung to the tune of "Camptown Races." ("Reds beat Giants 6-4," "Congress nixes budget cuts," etc.)

[salixbabylon.livejournal.com]

I am totally with you on most of those, particularly 2 and 3. But people have already said anything I would say, so I won't be repetitive.

But 6 -- I LOVE that. It's not that I'm against drabbles, it's just that, to me, either they should be a whole story, or they were a dumb idea that shouldn't have been made public anyway. What is the point of posting drabbles? I think I missed something.

I mean, sure, write them. Get your creative juices going with a daily drabble challenge. But if they're good ideas... why stop? If they're bad, why share?

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Yup.

Now, a well-done drabble -- an actual story that can be told in a hundred words -- that's a glorious thing. One of the first pieces of HP fanfic I ever read was Erised, (http://legato_bluesummers.tripod.com/fanfics/erised.htm) by Greer Shlivandas, which is a lovely example of the genre; there's a reason it exists, there's a reason it begins and ends where it does, and there's a reason why it's that short.

But entirely too many drabbles are 100-word outtakes from some larger story that will never be written, or 100-word outlines of what might eventually be a real story, or 100-word character-definition exercises that never ought to leave the writer's personal notebook.

[herdmentality.livejournal.com]

Like everybody else, I'm stunned that these opinions are actually unpopular. People are weird. Fandom makes them weirder.

[raveninthewind.livejournal.com]

I nodded in agreement with all your unpopular opinons, although with #10, I'd qualify it as "American television" because I like some British TV shows quite a lot (such as Coupling and Manchild and QAFUK).

And I'm a dedicated Buffy and frustrated Firefly fan, so even that qualification isn't true exactly. Maybe I should have said "almost all."

Plus, for me *gets ready to duck* even worse than drabbles, gen, pain, and incestfic is RPS. I mention that because it's related to #5 IMO.

on with the opinions!

[i-refuse-to.livejournal.com]

1. MPreg just doesn't work with RPS or with a "real world" situation. I agree completely with you.
2. Pain can work for me if it helps you to understand why the character behaves the way they do. I don't like people enjoying pain. That's effed up for me.
3. I won't even read a fic that's by PrinCess_butterfly or Dracos_Bi0tch. Get real.
4. William Shatner should remained clothed . . . forever.
5. I have that feeling as well, as much as I'd like to think they have perfect lives and live in perfect land.
6. Drabbles piss me off. They rarely say anything, but hell at least they're short so I don't waste too much of my life if I happen upon one.
7. I think i'm one of the few people in the world that don't care for PWP. If i want porn, I'll go to a porn site. So about the sex, I kinda see what you're saying.
8. Oh my god, me too.
9. Sibling incest . . . yuck. Why do people think twins are more like to go at it. No siblings are likely to just go hey you're hot and we live together, let's do it.
10. I love to hate television.
Keep it coming, I love opinions!